Posted November 28, 2013
hedwards: None of those are scientific pursuits. I don't care how many people you know who engage in those studies, they are still not science.
Personally, I think the insinuation that those are scientific pursuits to be both insulting as well as deeply disturbing. While we're at it, why don't we declare economists and tea leaf readers to be scientists? Or perhaps we shouldn't be leaving out the palm readers and tarot card experts.
The fact here is that the scientific method is thoroughly understood and it's a pain in the ass to follow the requirements. There's a reason why they call the hard sciences "hard" sciences it's because they're difficult as well as being focused on concrete reality.
Which is demonstrably not the case with any of those fields. I'm not even sure why anthropologists would feel entitled to use the term scientist when historians don't. In neither case are you ever going to reach a concrete conclusion based upon the scientific method. You're at best going to accurately describe what already exists.
amok: my oh my. I do wonder what paradigm you belong to... So you are saying that natural science are 'real' sciences and social sciences are not? I guess whether you can easily make your results into a graph or not is an important yardstick. Personally, I think the insinuation that those are scientific pursuits to be both insulting as well as deeply disturbing. While we're at it, why don't we declare economists and tea leaf readers to be scientists? Or perhaps we shouldn't be leaving out the palm readers and tarot card experts.
The fact here is that the scientific method is thoroughly understood and it's a pain in the ass to follow the requirements. There's a reason why they call the hard sciences "hard" sciences it's because they're difficult as well as being focused on concrete reality.
Which is demonstrably not the case with any of those fields. I'm not even sure why anthropologists would feel entitled to use the term scientist when historians don't. In neither case are you ever going to reach a concrete conclusion based upon the scientific method. You're at best going to accurately describe what already exists.
You may likewise say that "at best going to accurately describe what already exists" - also applies to 'hard' science. Creating a working mathematical model of magnetism, or a showing of how electrons changes position in H2O from water to ice, is nothing but doing so.
'Hard' and 'Soft' sciences are both Columbie eggs, though since social sciences are closer to everyday experiences it just seems more so.
This is just a matter of perception, more than anything else. having an understanding of how humans work, I would argue, is just as important as understanding how physics work.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/soft.htm
[url=http://bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/607%20Diamond%201987.htm]http://bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/607%20Diamond%201987.htm[/url]
edit - to put some light on it - I am educated as a chemist, and I am now doing a doctorate in education, so I have afoot in both 'hard' and 'soft' sciences. Neither is less or more rigours than the other, just different ways of thinking.
What's more, if physics or chemistry were that flaky, we'd have panes regularly crashing and no computers.
Psychology itself as a profession is on the way out. If you really want to know why people do things that solidly in the domain of behavioral neurologists. Medication and treatment-wise, you've got psychiatrists and social workers. I've been following that and the results are promising. Whereas you had psychologists guessing at what was going on in the brain, there's now the possibility with SPECT and fMRI technology to actually see sort of what's going on. For those cases where the behavior patterns aren't adequately telling you what's going on in the brain. The days of guessing about why people do things and to what end are coming to a close and most of those "incurable" cases aren't so much incurable as they are the result of medical incompetence.
Last I heard, anthropologists around here were ceasing to use the term science to refer to the discipline. In large part because there isn't an objective place to make assessments and study from. If they could establish that, then they'd have the chance to have a proper science develop around it.
It's one thing to not have good enough research data to work with and quite another to outright ignore the data we have. It's known that the willingness to seek something and the ability to enjoy something are on different neural pathways in the brain, but the DSM-V which just came out has those as the same diagnosis. Never mind that there's ample direct observation that says that it's not the case. Not to mention the number of psychologists that still operate under the assumption that there is something called normal in terms of neurophysiology. Because there really isn't something you can point to that's normal. People can and do vary, even in individuals who are not expressing abnormal behavior patterns.
Social scienes can have valuable contributions to make, but let's not delude the meaning of science any more than it already has been. It's bad enough that negative results are being seen as bad results and that we have string theorists who have been at it for decades without any testable hypotheses to show for it.